by Ewing, Al
Little humans.
The Doctor shuddered. “Sometimes I do miss it, I suppose,” he muttered, without specifying what it was.
Maya smiled sadly. “Maybe you should go and rule Venus. Or go conquer Mars. Or Lars could have Mars – there’s a certain poetry there. Lars of Mars... But you should find something that fits you. You’re obviously not happy where you are.”
“I’m happy enough,” he lied.
“You’re stagnating. I can tell. I’ve seen it happen before. You need something to do...” Maya looked at him for a moment. “Do you still play chess?”
The Doctor shook his head. “Not really.”
Maya smiled. “Lars and I still play, for old times’ sake, but... it’s too small a game, when you think about it.” She cocked her head, looking at him strangely, and her eyes seemed to be sizing him up, as though she was weighing something in her mind. She spoke the next words slowly, very carefully, as if worried she might break them. “I think you need to get out of the house.”
The Doctor shook his head. “I’m not sure...”
“Get out of America. Or at least out of your own head, which seems to be where you spend most of your time these days. Go somewhere different.” She leant back, studying him enigmatically, and the Doctor was reminded of when they’d first met, when she’d seemed so evil to him. He’d been thinking in human terms then; Maya was just old, that was all. So old as to be beyond simple definitions. “You’re clearly not well, Doctor. You haven’t been for some time. You’ve been under stress ever since... well, you know.” She smiled. “You need to relax a little.”
“Maya, I can’t –” He thought about the molten mirror, and what might happen if an idle thought struck him in a populated area. About the immense care he had to take, every second of every day, over everything he touched, in case he flexed his fingers carelessly and destroyed what he was holding. His words tailed off.
“I think you have to. What’s the alternative? You stay cooped up in that brownstone of yours until you go mad? Is that your plan? No wonder Lars wanted to escape.” Her voice softened. “Trust me. You need a holiday.”
Something in her manner put the Doctor on edge. Maya was hiding something, and for a moment he had visions of superhuman beings in white coats bursting into the room, restraining him with a butterfly net made of woven titanium. He almost laughed, but he was worried he might not be able to stop.
Maya was right. He did need a break.
“All right,” he said, in a shaky voice. “Where do you suggest?”
PARIS HAD CHANGED a lot in two hundred years.
The Doctor wandered, directionless, through the thick smog that made the city seem like some alien planet, and for a moment he imagined himself walking the streets of Venus. He nodded absently to those androids who passed by in all their varied shapes and colours, some humanoid, walking briskly, others clattering on a multitude of metal legs, strange monsters leering out of the yellow mist. The alien feel of the city extended to the architecture; where the old brickwork had crumbled, or been eroded by acid rain, it was replaced by strange metallic structures, designed for mechanoid rather than human use. The Doctor felt like an explorer in an unknown galaxy.
Maya had been right. This was just the place to take his mind off things.
The great robot revolution of the mid-twenty-first century had led to most of the human population being driven out – first from the big cities, and then even from the surrounding towns and villages of France. Even the most organised guerrilla unit couldn’t compete with beings who could, to all intents and purposes – by virtue of wireless radio frequencies – communicate telepathically. And while humans were extremely adaptable, new robots could be built for any situation; as the Doctor walked along the Seine, he noted that the streets were being cleaned by a large mechanical beetle, about the size of a dog, spraying water from jets poking from its sides. Once, it had sprayed napalm, to burn guerrilla fighters out of the forests; the humanoid robots passing by tipped their hats to it.
There was little sound. Most of the robots around him communicated telepathically, though the more polite ones wished him a pleasant afternoon as they passed.
The French purges had led to war between robot-held France and Italy, with the other nations undecided about whether or not to step in; however, before the war had entered its second year, Maya had stepped in, using her man Rousseau and the almost-defunct intelligence system TURING to broker an uneasy peace between the various factions, focussing on reparations to the dispossessed French, and then a trade deal that would give everyone something approaching what they wanted. Italy renewed their old alliance with France, which immediately raised tensions with Russia, and suddenly the Mecha-Principalities were supplying them with advanced weaponry, in return for coal and oil.
Especially coal.
He passed a robot slumped in a doorway; twenty years old by the look of him, perhaps a little more. Looking inside him confirmed the worst; his internal boiler had run down from a lack of coal. The Doctor considered using his vision to heat the water inside him to steam, giving the machine enough power to perhaps get home to its loved ones, but he decided against it. His control wasn’t the best; he could just as easily melt the robot into a puddle of slag. It was true that if he did cause some damage to these people – an overzealous handshake, say, or an idle thought while looking at a limb – they could be repaired, unlike flesh and blood. But that didn’t mean he should take chances needlessly. Besides, where would it end? Heat one, you’d have to heat them all. There just wasn’t enough coal to go around.
The lack of coal was becoming a serious problem in the developed world; some of the poorer European countries were already at each other’s throats over it, and China had – quietly and without fuss – gained the status of an economic superpower by judicious export of its coal reserves. Their own economy was more agrarian, which the Doctor had always thought was a wise move; occasionally, on the rare occasions when he slept – a luxury rather than a necessity – he had dreams of Manhattan as a place of empty, forgotten spires, coated with vegetation, with a feudal society growing crops in the ruins and the cracks in the pavement. These dreams were filled with dead, lightless bulbs – the signifiers of the dreampunk movement, after the death of Warhol. Presumably, they signified what was waiting if the world continued on its present course. Agrarianism was the future, assuming a new power source didn’t appear out of nowhere any time soon.
America, Italy and Japan were all deeply indebted to the Chinese regime, having used up their own supply of coal more than a century ago, but nobody was deeper in the hole than the Mecha-Principalities. Coal wasn’t a matter of power to them, or technology, or even civilisation; it was their food and drink, it was life itself, and they got through it at an appalling rate.
The Doctor sniffed the air, wincing as tendrils of yellow smoke entered his lungs; the pollution index was higher in Paris than in any other part of the world, including Magna Britannia, which accounted for the sharp drop-off in tourism. Paris had been a popular destination in the decades immediately after the Robot War, as humans plucked up their courage to explore the astonishing sights and sounds of the City of Machines; it had been a glittering paradise of strangeness and charm, populated by some of the most famous androids of the era. There was the red-suited robot gladiator, Magnus, who could punch through steel... the novelist Zane Gort, whose mathematically-precise tales had been translated into dozens of languages, including binary... Deckard, the robot detective who, through a quirk of his internal arrays, believed himself a human being... the great robot rights lawyer Andrew Martin, who won the 2069 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Rousseau-1 on the Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights, and lived for almost two hundred years... and towering over them all, the gigantic King of the Robots, Pluto. Tourism, more than anything else, had cemented the fragile peace between man and robot into something lasting.
And now the smog had separated man from robot once again.
The robots didn’t need to breathe, of course – and neither did the Doctor – but, outside the toxic cloud of yellow mist that was drifting ever further across the borders of Italy, Spain and Switzerland, that had swallowed Luxembourg and half of Belgium, the humans muttered darkly that the machines would poison the whole world if they were allowed to.
The Doctor sighed. He couldn’t help but wonder when the Fifth European War would begin, and what his part in it might be.
Thinking of Pluto, he remembered a report he’d read a year or two ago on the titanic robot leader, about how he was working to find a new power source and end the dependency on coal that was slowly killing the world. He’d made some strides forward with geothermal energy, but little of practical value. Still, it might be interesting to talk to Pluto again – they’d exchanged a few words in the early twenty-second century, and the Doctor had always meant to speak to him further, but they’d never had the chance. Idly, the Doctor focussed his vision, looking through the smog, through the crowds, through buildings, flicking through the city like a book of maps...
...there he was, tending to a vast array of clockwork; presumably another iteration of the MARX system, or something based on it. On a whim, he looked closely at the King of the Robots, looking through his mechanisms, studying his inner workings. Most of them had been replaced over the centuries, but the central core of his personality was still as it was; right at the centre of the great brass and steel body there was a small core of parts over two hundred years old, and in the middle of that, there was a small metal tank...
The Doctor blinked, and looked again. He stared at the lump of pulsing grey matter, staring inside it, reading the DNA spirals, translating them in his mind. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.
And yet, it was.
“El Sombra?”
“EL SOMBRA?”
Pluto froze at the words.
He was standing inside the massive iron structure that had replaced the French Parliament – a gigantic cube of burnished metal that squatted in between the older, acid-damaged buildings. The interior of the structure was no less strange; in the centre of the metal floor was a vast, steel-lined pit, leading down hundreds of miles, through the planet’s crust and into the magma below. Around the outside of the pit, various pipes carried superheated lava from below, using it instead of precious coal to heat vast tanks of water, funnelling steam through a vast network of valves and hydraulics. These in turn powered an immense thinking machine, twice as tall as Pluto himself and several times as broad, a massive network of analytical arrays hundreds of thousands of times more complex than anything ever attempted before. The machine, with the somewhat prosaic name of the Variable Integer Calculator, was in its twentieth iteration now; the VIC-1 could have out-thought all of the old-style distributed arrays, like MARX or OSMAN or TURING, put together. The VIC-20 made it look like a child’s toy; however, like all the VIC series, it could not think on its own. It merely augmented what was already there.
The computer was built in the shape of an immense throne.
Slowly, the great brass head turned to look on the intruder. The Doctor had not bothered with the cube’s doors - though he could have easily opened them, despite their massive weight. Instead, he had simply torn a hole for himself in one wall, bending the steel like cardboard.
“El Sombra?” he repeated.
Pluto gazed at him for a moment, then responded. “Once.”
“All this time...” The Doctor shook his head incredulously. “I haven’t seen you since – well, since you came bursting into the warehouse...” And ruined my life, he thought, but that wasn’t fair. It was Jason Satan who’d cursed him with immortality. He couldn’t start blaming El Sombra for it just because the man – or whatever he was now – happened to be standing in front of him.
Still, he felt a wave of resentment and anger wash through him. “What happened? All this time, we thought there was no brain inside there –”
“The French forces who discovered me thought there might be, at first. There were plans to take me apart and find out.”The voice was deep and loud, and the Doctor realised with the chill that there was nothing human left in it. “It was relatively easy to persuade them that I was worth more to them in working order. Since then... if something is presented as common knowledge, it will be believed.” He returned to his tinkering.
“What happened to you? Good God, man, how did you end up in there?”
“I remember little. Memories of my old life are hazy at best.” His speech patterns were different – more refined, more considered. The Doctor kept waiting for an ‘amigo,’ but none came. “I remember being taken into Hell. I have a vague recollection of my mind... fracturing. And then... I remember waking up. And for the first time, being able to think – to really think, on a level I was not capable of before.”
He paused, as if working out how to say it without causing offence. “I was very, very stupid in my old life, Doctor. Most humans are.”
“Excuse me?”the Doctor said. That feeling of resentment was growing stronger.
“Oh, I don’t include you in that group.” The Doctor’s fists clenched involuntarily. “If your intelligence is limited, it’s because you restrict your thinking. You want to be human, so you think in human terms. You should try to be more like the others of your kind – Lomax and Maya Britannia. Use the full potential of the superhuman mind.”
“And what if I’d rather be human?” The Doctor’s voice was an angry whisper.
“You never were in the first place.”
The Doctor said nothing, but the knuckles of his fists were white.
“You should accept what you are, Doctor. I’ve learned to enjoy this existence, despite its imperfections – and there are many. I miss being able to feel things. I remember I used to laugh...”
“You were more full of life than any man I’d ever met,” the Doctor said, quietly. “And now you’re... this.”
“Exactly. I am ‘this,’ as you say. I won’t give it up.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. “From inside this body... this mind... I can make things better, Doctor. I can change the world.”
The Doctor scowled. He hadn’t really liked Pluto before, and knowing what he knew now, he liked the King of the Robots even less. “How? By driving people from their homes and putting machines in their place?”
“Those ‘machines’ you’re talking about are people. I’m not ashamed of forcing you to see them as equals. But I have bigger plans now. You’re watching them take shape, as a matter of fact.” He picked up a huge bank of arrays – easily weighing a ton or more – and slotted it into its place. The machine he was constructing chattered briefly as the clockwork sprang to life.
“The VIC-20?”
“Imagine expanding your consciousness – your intelligence – to hundreds of thousands of times its normal capacity. What wouldn’t you be able to do? I’ve been using the VIC series to build more and more powerful iterations of itself for the past half a century, and I’ve yet to reach a limit. I’ve been able to solve problems that have puzzled the human species for centuries.”
The Doctor narrowed his eyes. “Isn’t there a weak link in the system?”
“Ah, yes. My organic component –”
“Your brain.” The Doctor gritted his teeth. “Your humanity.”
Pluto continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
“– my organic component isn’t designed for this kind of use. Not to mention that the Ultimate Reich technology keeping it alive is pitifully out of date – it’s not going to continue functioning for that much longer. In as little as a decade, that part of me will start to fail, and I’ll have to remove it.” He paused again, and his hands moved slightly, in a dismissive gesture – the three-story robot equivalent of a shrug, the Doctor assumed. “My personality will change slightly, of course. I won’t be able to retain my current degree of creativity or initiative. Still, most of the essential information of myself will remain, and evolve. I will c
ontinue to exist.”
A vague chill was creeping up the Doctor’s spine; a sense of unimaginable, indefinable horror. “So you’ll just remove your... your self? Your soul? Like changing the tyre on an auto?”
There was a long pause, and then Pluto made a series of short, staccato noises. The Doctor took a moment to realise it for what it was; a mechanical chuckle. “Oh, Doctor,” he said, his voice tinged with something approaching amusement. “I wouldn’t have thought a man in your position would worry much about the condition of his soul.”
The Doctor looked down at his clenched fist, then up at the brass head. The serene expression that the gigantic head permanently wore seemed somehow smug now, taunting him from above. I should leave, he thought. That isn’t the man I knew; nobody’s how I remember them, they’re either dead or changed and I can’t connect with them any more, or anyone else. I should take Maya’s advice – go to Venus, or Mars... or just shoot myself out into space and be alone...
Another thought struck him; it was Maya’s idea that he come here in the first place. Had she known? And if she had, why would she want him to find out like this?
Maybe she’d sent him to confirm her own suspicions. The Doctor felt a terrible weariness settle over him; he wanted to be free of all of it, of the endless schemes of the immortals and the petty needs of humanity. He wanted it to all be over, he wanted to just go to sleep and forget everything, he wanted to – go ahead and admit it, to yourself if nobody else –
– to die.
Once and for all, he wanted to die.
